How many mentors?

[AllenGregoryIV]

We have been running a 30 student team with one mentor. I've had a little help from parents in getting food to meetings and a few teachers that helped with trip supervision but none of them were involved with the student projects. It's definitely possible and like Don said you have to make sure you have students with a lot of the skills needed to handle build season.

This year we are bringing on two new teachers as mentors who have both been running middle school teams for the past few years. It's going to be an interesting transition for the team but it's coming at a good time since we just graduated nearly half our team last year.

[Walter Deitzler]

We have 2 engineering mentors and 1 "coach," who does all of the business things on the team (booking hotels, finding food, ordering parts, etc.)

[jimwick]

We have a core group of 5-6 mentors who are active all year; of those one or two are parents.
During the build season there are perhaps another 5-6 who are pretty regular; some of them are parents.
Another 10-15 adults help out in some capacity, such a helping with lunches, transportation, fundraising, etc.

This varies from year to year as students come and go; their parents usually come and go accordingly.

[evanperryg]

We have 13 official mentors, and 8 or so parents that show up and help sometimes.
of our 13 mentors:
12 showed up more than once during build season.
6 showed up regularly.
3 were at every meeting, the whole time
2 were in the shop until 2 in the morning with me and the drive team, the night before champs.
1 donates his (enormous) trailer and truck so we can move our pit and robot to our various events, has dug through the broken/dead components at his company to bring us really cool stuff, and has driven a truck full of students 5 hours to st. louis at 7 in the morning.